1940–1943: (The North African Theater and the Expulsion of the Axis — The Italian Invasion of Egypt from Libya in 1940, the Arrival of the German Afrika Korp…

1940–1943: (The North African Theater and the Expulsion of the Axis — The Italian Invasion of Egypt from Libya in 1940, the Arrival of the German Afrika Korps, El Alamein in October 1942 Saving Suez for the British Empire, Egyptian Nationalism Proving More Durable Than Rommel, the US Landing in Morocco and Algeria, and the Final Expulsion of Axis Forces from Tunisia in May 1943): The only other theater of combat on the African continent was along a narrow Mediterranean coastal strip. The Italians invaded Egypt from Libya in late summer 1940 but were soon pushed back by a small British force that advanced into Libya itself — the situation was transformed only with the arrival of the German Afrika Korps, which drove toward the Suez Canal apparently unstoppably. Egyptian nationalists grew restless and anti-British sentiment heightened, but when the British halted the Germans at El Alamein in October 1942, the tide turned and Suez was safe for the British empire — for now. In fact, the threat from Egyptian nationalism would prove rather more durable than that offered by Rommel. As British and Australian forces drove the Germans back toward Tunisia, a US army landed at the other end of the Mediterranean in Morocco and Algeria, ending the uneasy political ambiguity of the Vichy arrangement. Allied forces, closing from west and east, met in Tunisia and expelled the last Axis troops from Africa in May 1943. The campaigns demonstrated once again that Africa was not merely a theater of European conflict but a continent whose strategic geography shaped the outcome of global wars — and whose peoples bore costs for which no accounting was ever rendered.